Saturday, September 7, 2024

An Ongoing Appreciation of Nadine Sierra

Those that have been following my work for some time may know that I find it hard to resist writing articles about soprano Nadine Sierra. The fact is that this preference was launched back in my Examiner.com days, when I wrote about her performance in the San Francisco Performances Salon Series in November of 2011. At that time she was an Adler Fellow with the San Francisco Opera (SFO) and had recently made her mark with an extended solo in the world premiere of Christopher Theofanidis’ Heart of a Soldier.

Now she is in New York making regular performances at the Metropolitan Opera. The last time I wrote about one of her performances was in November of 2022, when Great Performances at the Met broadcast Simon Stone’s imaginative staging of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. Since that time, she has also served as hostess for at least one Great Performances production.

This morning I had an opportunity to catch up on saved videos by watching a recent Met telecast of Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette from last season. This was a production staged by Bartlett Sher with Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting. To be fair, I have never been particularly enthusiastic about Gounod; but, by the same count, I have seldom (if ever) been disappointed by a Sher production.

Screen shot from the YouTube video of Nadine Sierra singing “Je veux vivre”

As a result, the viewing experience easily held my attention. Nevertheless, I have to confess that I was not prepared for Sierra’s appearance, even though I had previously seen her in that role in an SFO video. To say that she nailed her Met performance as Juliette would border on understatement. Her delivery of “Je veux vivre” was so compelling that I put my recording on hold to write this article! (For the record, I first heard her sing this at her Salon recital.) Apparently, the Met agrees with me, since they have uploaded a version of it to YouTube!

Mind you, I am not sure that my enthusiasm will sustain throughout the entire production. Some of the liberties that librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré took with William Shakespeare border on cringe-inducing (if not crossing the line). This is particularly the case in their extended embellishment of Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, which (no surprise) was turned into an aria. The text has been given augmentations that many (myself included) would find grotesque; but Will Liverman’s delivery did its best to smooth over the rougher edges.

Still, having been blown away by Sierra’s talents, I should be able to pull myself back together to watch the rest of the Met video!

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